The current age has been termed by some the “Communications Age”—a time when people are focused on sharing information effectively. Geographic boundaries and physical distances are becoming less significant as people find new ways to communicate and share information with each other.
As communication increases, the amount of knowledge and information transferred between communicants also increases. Unable to remember all of this information on their own, people often rely on devices, such as mobile terminals, to provide storage of and access to information. Even with the help of external devices, however, proper organization of the information is important for allowing a person, such as the user of a mobile terminal, to find a required item of information quickly and conveniently.
In an effort to organize information, mobile terminals today generally use multiple applications for storing and providing access to certain types of information. For example, a user's contacts, or people with whom the user may communicate, may be stored in one application, and the user's messages, or the information/communication exchanged between the user and another, may be stored in another application. Such an arrangement typically requires the user to access a Contacts application to obtain information associated with the user's contacts, such as telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. A user may also compose a message to one of the user's contact from within the Contacts application. However, in order to view a message, for example a message that has been received by the user, the user must access a different application, such as a Messaging application, to view or review the message.
A user may be able to create a folder or other organizational structure within the Messaging application in which to store certain messages sent and received. For example, the user may create a folder in which he may store and access all messages sent to or received from a particular person. However, the user would still not be able to access information other than the stored messages from the Messaging application.
Thus, there is a need for associating and displaying messages and contacts in a way that allows users to access either category of information more quickly and conveniently.